Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (2 page)

Strong-jawed and broad-shouldered, with reddish hair and a pair of wire-rim glasses that gave him an air of industriousness, Fred Chase Koch cut a dashing figure galloping up and down the polo field at the Kansas City Country Club. It was a September day in 1932, and debutantes crowded the sidelines to watch the match between the local old-money boys and the visiting squad from Wichita—a town newly flush with oil wealth, where Fred was a partner in a fledgling engineering company that catered to the refining industry. One of those society belles was Mary Clementine Robinson, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a prominent Kansas City surgeon and granddaughter of a founding faculty member at Kansas University. She was tall, graceful, and erudite, with delicate features and a wavy bob of chestnut hair. A graduate of Wellesley with a degree in French, she was a talented artist and had worked as a designer for the Kansas City apparel maker Nelly Don.

Fred had remained a bachelor into his early thirties. There had been little time for settling down. He traveled regularly to far-flung locales to oversee the construction of refinery equipment and scare up new business opportunities for his firm, the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company. Recently, his work had even taken him to the Soviet Union, where Fred’s firm helped to overhaul the
country’s archaic oil refineries, a lucrative contract that had made him and his partner millionaires.

That Fred was riding on the same polo field as the elite of Kansas City and in the company of women like Mary Robinson, whose ancestors included some of the earliest colonial settlers, spoke to his rapid rise from hardscrabble origins.

The second son of a Dutch immigrant turned frontier newspaperman, Fred was born on September 23, 1900, in Quanah, Texas, a poor but plucky town just east of the panhandle. To a boy, unaware of the hardships of frontier life, this whistle-stop town on the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway seemed like paradise. It had streams to fish, plentiful game to hunt, and fields to roam. At the turn of the century, Indians still periodically came to town, including Quanah’s stoic namesake, Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, who enjoyed visiting Fred’s father, Harry, to gawk at his modern printing press.

Though a magical place for a boy, Quanah’s allure diminished year by year as Fred grew into an ambitious young man. He came of age in a time of rapid technological change, and he suspected his future lay beyond his hometown, an enclave surrounded by prairie that stretched to the horizon, interrupted by occasional stands of spindly mesquite.

When Fred was born, there were fewer than eight thousand cars in the United States. They were expensive and impractical, the playthings of the rich. Yet by Fred’s sophomore year at Quanah High School, there were 2 million. Thanks, in part, to Henry Ford’s decision to forgo steam or electricity for gas-powered internal combustion engines in his signature automobiles, there was now a growing national thirst for gasoline, once considered a useless by-product of converting crude oil to kerosene.

Texas ranchers had once shaken their heads bitterly as they drilled down through the bone-dry soil in search of water, only for viscous oil to ooze to the surface. Now wildcatters raced to sink
wells and tap the next big gusher. Among those lured in by the oil boom was Fred’s uncle, Louis B. “L. B.” Simmons, who had established a refinery in the oil town of Duncan, Oklahoma. The future, to Fred’s way of thinking, no longer belonged to those who could make crops grow in the soil, but to the engineers and entrepreneurs who could extract wealth from what lay beneath the surface.

A gifted student with a particular aptitude for science and math, Fred left home in the fall of 1917 for the newly established Rice University in Houston. The bustling oil-rich city was a significant change of pace from Quanah, where the Koch family’s home phone number had been all of a single digit—3. Fred thrived at Rice. His teachers considered him a standout student and his peers elected him president of his sophomore class. But like his father, Harry, whose wanderlust had led him from the Dutch harbor city of Workum to a dusty frontier town in Texas, Fred soon grew restless to experience the world.

He spent the summer after his sophomore year working aboard the SS
Coweta
, a Merchant Marine vessel, as it steamed to England. When he returned, he did not go back to Rice. Instead, he moved east to Boston, matriculating to the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with his studies, he also took up boxing and briefly captained the MIT team.

Fred’s engineering skills were in demand, and even before graduating, he accepted a position with Texas Company (later Texaco), where he worked as a research engineer at the company’s Port Arthur refinery on the Gulf Coast. But he saw little future there: “The way up the ladder in that large organization looked very steep and difficult.” So he quit, joined another oil company, then resigned from that one, too. As he struggled to drum up work as a consultant, Fred heard from an MIT friend, Carl de Ganahl, whose father was building a refinery in England and who would become a mentor to the callow engineer.

Charles Francis de Ganahl’s résumé read like an adventure
novel. He was an explorer and entrepreneur who as a young man had established a sugar plantation deep in the Mexican interior after opening the country’s upper Panuco River to boat navigation. Over his trail-blazing career he dabbled in everything from shipbuilding to oil, and from plane manufacturing to gold mining, with business interests that spanned three continents.

In the early 1920s, with the domestic supply of oil increasingly controlled by the major U.S. oil companies, Ganahl established a petroleum refinery and storage facility in England. The Soviet Union supplied the refinery with the bulk of its oil, transporting it by tanker from the Georgian city of Batoum on the Black Sea.

Located on the Isle of Grain, where the Thames and Medway Rivers flow into the North Sea, Ganahl’s Medway Oil and Storage Company was ideally situated to provide deepwater access to oceangoing tankers. But the terrain, largely reclaimed marshland, posed an array of engineering challenges.

In 1924, Ganahl—seeking to build out Medway as a refining and distribution hub—took a chance on Fred, making him the chief engineer on the project. Fred worked alongside Ganahl’s son, the company’s operations manager, to design and construct a new refinery on the island. Ganahl would later call Fred “the soundest chemical engineer in the world” and say he possessed “as brilliant a pair of brain lobes as are worn by any young man of my acquaintance.” The admiration was mutual. Fred considered Ganahl a mentor, if not a father figure, and the men remained close the rest of their lives.

In 1925, with the refinery project completed, Fred headed back to the United States. He planned to go straight to Texas to visit his parents, but detoured to Wichita, Kansas, at the invitation of an MIT classmate named Percival “Dobie” Keith. Keith had recently partnered with Lewis E. Winkler, a self-taught engineer and former Army sergeant, to form a new engineering firm. He wanted Fred to come to work for them.

If Fred had learned anything from Charles de Ganahl, it was that the most successful men controlled their destinies—they were owners, not employees. Fred countered Keith’s offer with his own. He wouldn’t work for them—but he would work with them, as a full partner in the engineering firm. Keith and Winkler agreed to his terms. For $300, Fred bought a one-third stake in the outfit.

It was hard to imagine that the confident, worldly, and fabulously rich man standing in front of Mary Robinson had, just a few years earlier, been so poor that he had lived in his office, located in Wichita’s Continental Oil building on the banks of the Arkansas River. As players and spectators mingled on the manicured polo field after the match, Mary and Fred were introduced. Smitten, he pursued his courtship of her as if closing the most important business deal of his life. Fred came from a humble background, but Mary’s parents approved of him. He came across as a man of substance and sound judgment. After all, Fred had quickly parlayed a $300 investment into an enviable fortune. On October 22, 1932, a month (and six dates) after Fred and Mary met, they married.

Fred and his bride were opposites. He was “a typical old country boy,” as one friend put it, “except everything he touched turned to money.” She was artistic and sophisticated, an extrovert who seemed most in her element buzzing around a cocktail party. “She was the epitome of a lady. Absolutely beautiful,” Mary’s niece, Carol Margaret Allen, recalled. “She was one of the loveliest hostesses I’ve ever known in my life.”

Fred, by contrast, was a quiet, serious man, who did his best to avoid parties and social gatherings, abhorred chitchat and gossip, and generally eschewed superfluous things. “Fred was a strong man; he wasn’t a party man.… When you could get him out he would gravitate to the smartest man at the party,” Mary remembered. He preferred to pass the time with a book, tinkering with a
new refinery design at his drafting desk, or out hunting or fishing in the solitude of nature.

For their many differences, the couple complemented each other. Fred shared his love of the outdoors with Mary, teaching his wife how to hunt and shoot. Mary schooled Fred in fine art.

If the newlyweds had little time to get acquainted during their brisk courtship, their honeymoon remedied that. Fred planned an extravagant, seven-month sojourn that spanned four continents, carrying them by air, land, and sea to some of the remotest and most exotic reaches of the world. The inspiration for the elaborate trip came from Fred’s former boss, Ganahl, who had taken his wife on a similar globe-spanning journey.

The Kochs sailed from New York that November, visiting the white-sand beaches of Cuba, touring the Panama Canal, and exploring the barrios of Santiago, Chile. One day, as they prepared to board a train that would carry them across the Andes, a clerk stopped the couple and informed Mary she would have to leave her steamer trunk behind; space was limited and they had brought too much luggage. Mary was adventurous, and she had her rugged side, but she was also accustomed to a certain level of comfort.

“But this is my trousseau!” Mary pouted.

Fred attempted to soothe his new wife. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll buy you 10 trousseaus.”

The offer was little consolation. When the train departed later that day without her trunk, Mary was sullen. Staring mournfully out the window, she noticed a small plane trailing closely behind them. Fred saw her following it with her eyes and leaned over, smiling: “Mary, that’s the charter plane I’ve hired to bring over your trousseau.”

After crisscrossing South America, from small jungle villages to the cosmopolitan cities of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, they traveled to Portugal and Spain, taking in the plazas of Madrid and catching a bull fight in Seville. From Gibraltar, they crossed into
Africa, browsing the open-air bazaars of Tangiers and Alexandria. Wearing pith hats and outfitted head to toe in khaki, they toured the Sudan and spent weeks on safari in Tanzania and Kenya. Fred felled a pair of leopards and later had their pelts made into a fur coat for Mary.

Loaded down with souvenirs and artifacts, the couple returned to Wichita in May 1933, settling on a rambling tract on the rural outskirts of the city. Initially, they lived in a modest, white home with black shutters, but Fred soon began construction of a grand Tudor-style mansion on the grounds.

Built of light-colored stone, the house had archways, gables, and a heavy, Gothic-looking front door that gave it the feel of an English manor. It featured a stately circular drive and espaliered shrubbery, a wading pool on a patio off the dining room, and a four-car garage. Elsewhere on the property were stables for Fred’s twelve polo ponies, which Mary helped to exercise nearly every morning.

The mansion’s interior mingled both of their styles, rustic and elegant—on one wall the mounted head of an antelope, on another Renoir’s
Girl in Lavender Skirt
. Thomas Hart Benton’s
The Music Lesson
hung above a plush burnt-orange sofa in the half-timbered living room. A downstairs game room, draped with animal skins, housed the Kochs’ growing collection of hunting trophies, including a wall crammed with the heads of exotic horned creatures.

Mary had returned from their honeymoon pregnant with their first child. Before long, the Koch mansion echoed with the voices of four young boys.

Born in August 1933, Frederick Robinson Koch was named for his father, but with a twist of refinement. The patriarch was just plain old Fred. Mary gave birth to another boy in November 1935. Following a family tradition established by Fred’s father, Harry, they named their second son after a business associate. “Am very
greatly honored and delighted but shocked that you are so cruel to the boy,” the child’s namesake telegrammed, playfully, after receiving news of the birth of Charles de Ganahl Koch.

In May 1940 came the birth of fraternal twins David Hamilton Koch and William Ingraham Koch. With the arrival of four sons in seven years, Fred had given a lot of thought to forging his boys into men. He had come up in a place where sometimes all that separated prosperity from poverty was an unfortunate turn in the weather. Quanah was a town of strivers. This environment—and watching his own father’s rise from penniless immigrant to successful local businessman—had fueled Fred’s ambition. If he handed his boys everything, what would motivate them to make something of themselves? Fred feared that a life of privilege would little by little erode their independence, and he worried that they would rely on his successes and never bother to achieve their own. “The most glorious feeling,” Fred often told his sons, “is the feeling of accomplishment.”

“He wanted to make sure, because we were a wealthy family, that we didn’t grow up thinking that we could go through life not doing anything,” Charles once recalled. Fred’s mantra, drilled repeatedly into their minds, was that he had no intention of raising “country-club bums.” Complicating matters, the Koch compound sat directly across East 13th Street from the exclusive Wichita Country Club.